Our full slate of reviews for next week isn’t set in stone yet, but we promise we will be covering two frequently requested movies from the reader-review queue: we’ll peek at Andrzej Zulawski’s weird bestiality fantasy/nightmare, Possession (1981); and we’ll tag along on Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s mind-blowing mystical trip to The Holy Mountain (1973). You can also expect Alfred to continue his series on the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney movies with a review of The Unknown (1927), featuring another of this director’s typically freakish scenarios: it’s the tale of an armless knife thrower. Throw in a mystery review and you have a pretty weird week to savor.
There wasn’t a huge volume of weird search terms turning up in our server logs this week, but what the queries lacked in quantity they made up for in quality. There were two gems this week. While we’d sort of like to see a “weird swirl picks that move free online,” especially since it’s free (not sure anyone would pay to see a swirl pick a movie, no matter how weird), this string wasn’t strange enough to rate better than third place this week. The runner-up entry, “she excreted forest,” could have been a weird enough term to win another week; but we found the search for the answer to the burning question of “why criminals deficate” to be the most mind-blowing query of the week. Well done, Google!
Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue stands (as always, many more titles after the jump): Possession (next week!);The Holy Mountain (next week!);Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Sublime; Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Brazil; The Casserole Masters; Dark Crystal; Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (this appears to be unavailable at Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
Bufford, an unkempt social outcast, attempts to gain acceptance through the use of Yum Yum brand hair products.
More strange humor, including an Asian playing “Hotel California” at a thrift store, and a rap video about digestion, can be found on The Octocorn Network’s Youtube channel.
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.
IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):
Sucker Punch (2011): Scantily clad young ladies go on an imaginary butt-kicking video-game inspired quest in Zach Snyder‘s latest comic book spectacle. We’re not sure we’d qualify this as “weird” (we’ll see), but there has been some discussion about it ’round here. Sucker Punch official site.
FILM FESTIVALS: GUADALAJARA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Guadalajara, Mexico, Mar. 25 – Apr. 1)
Normally the Festival Internacional de Cine de Guadalajara wouldn’t draw too much attention from us, but there’s an interesting curiosity debuting there:
El vampiro y el sexo (1969): El Santo’s first color film, Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula, had the wrestling superhero using a past life regression machine (?) and pitted him against Dracula and a coven of female vampires. Like all El Santo movies it was family friendly, but for years a still showing a Dracula-type posing with bare breasted women had circulated among El Santo fans; it was said to be from a racier version of the film. It turns out the rumors weren’t just wishful thinking; a cut of the film featuring the squeaky clean hero tempted by nude vampires had been made and shelved. The film has been reconstructed and is seeing it’s debut as El vampiro y el sexo in a vampire movie retrospective hosted by Guillermo del Toro (other movies screening in the series include the original Nosferatu, Dreyer‘s Vampyr, Polanski‘s The Fearless Vampire Killers, Andy Warhol‘s Blood for Dracula, Werner Herzog‘s Nosferatu with Count Klaus Kinski, Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the underappreciated Habit, and E. Elias Merhige‘s Shadow of the Vampire, among others). Bloody cool! Here’s del Toro’s take on sexy El Santo (in Spanish and English) from the festival’s site. [NOTE: The Guadalajara festival site briefly went down, but is back up as of March 26. Here’s a news article on the El Santo film in case you can’t get through to Guadalajara.]
FILM FESTIVALS: DALLAS FILM FESTIVAL (Dallas, TX, Mar. 31 – Apr. 10)
The Dallas Film Festival is not one of the premier movie gatherings in the USA; it is, however, one of the cheapest, particularly if you have old college buddies in town who will let you crash on their floor. A mere two months after Sundance, Texans can catch many of the Aspen films for a mere $10 a pop. The main reason to mention this particular festival, however, is that 366 plans to be in town opening weekend to take in some of the weirder offerings, to wit:
The Future: A couple fret that the pending adoption of a cat (who narrates) will mean the end of their youthful freedom, and they slowly drift apart into surreal, solipsistic dreams. 366 in attendance Apr. 1., 7:30 PM.
The Last Circus [Balada Triste de Trompeta]: Álex de la Iglesia blackly parodies the Spanish Civil War as a Happy Clown and a Sad Clown fight (to the death) over a beautiful trapeze artist. See 366 there at midnight, Apr 2.
The Oregonian: A nameless woman wanders around in an Oregon wilderness meeting bizarre characters. This one had walkouts at Sundance. 366 will be there at 10:15 PM on Apr. 3 and promises to stay until the bitter end.
If you’re in DFW next weekend and see a guy in a 366 Weird Movies t-shirt, feel free to say “hi” (saying “here’s a sawbuck” while extending a greased palm is also considered an appropriate form of greeting). Expect reviews of the foregoing to follow. Dallas Film Festival home page.
“4 Movie Marathon: Dark Comedy Collection”: This 4-pack from Universal is less bizarre than their “Cult Horror” edition (see above): the only film of marginal weird interest is John Waters‘ Serial Mom (1994), which marked a return to (relatively muted) bad taste for the Prince of Puke after a pair of PG-13 experiments in the late 80s. Half the films are from Neil La Butte: his oddball and much maligned Nurse Betty (2000), and the better-received suburban sex satire Your Friends and Neighbors (1998). The hooker-killing critical flop Very Bad Things (1998) fills out the set. Buy 4 Movie Marathon: Dark Comedy Collection (Serial Mom / Nurse Betty / Very Bad Things / Your Friends & Neighbors).
Siren (2010): A group of friends out on a pleasure cruise find a seductive woman on a deserted island; is she a mythological siren leading them to their doom? This direct-to-DVD horror reportedly contains some reality-bending. Buy Siren.
“Venture Brothers, Season 4, Vol. 2”: The cult TV series spoofing “Johnny Quest” and comic book culture with a uniquely absurdist spin releases the second half of its fourth season on DVD. Contains eight episodes, including the one-hour season finale. Please note that the DVD releases are split into two volumes; season 4 is available in its entirety on Blu-ray (see below). Buy “The Venture Bros.: Season 4, Vol. 2” (DVD).
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
“Venture Brothers, Season 4”: See description in DVD above. This release fits the entirety of Season 4 onto two Blu-rays, rather than splitting the season into two sets as was done on DVD. Buy “The Venture Bros.: The Complete Season 4” [Blu-ray].
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Currently Untitled (2010): Adam Cooley couldn’t get anyone to work with him for free on his experimental film, so he made an experimental film about making an experimental film on his own. It’s the 8 1/2 of no-budget filmmaking. Definitely weird; nearly every fame is altered with distorted sounds and/or visuals. Available on YouTube (in five parts) or as an .avi download. You can also visit Adam’s homepage for links to more of his experimental free offerings. Watch Currently Untitled (part 1 of 5) free on YouTube.
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
The Road to Mandalay (1926) & West of Zanzibar (1928) represent the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaboration at the height of its nefarious, Oedipal zenith, brought to you, for your entertainment, by Irving Thalberg.
Unfortunately, The Road to Mandalay exists only in fragmented and disintegrated state, a mere 36 minutes of its original seven reels. In this passionately pretentious film, which is not related to the Kipling poem, Chaney plays “dead-eyed” Singapore Joe (Chaney achieved the eye effect with egg white) who runs a Singapore brothel. Joe’s business associates are the black spiders of the Seven Seas: the Admiral Herrington (Owen Moore) and English Charlie Wing (Kamiyama Sojin), the best knife-thrower in the Orient. Joe’s relationship with his partners is tense and, often, threatening.
Apparently, Joe’s wife is long dead. The two had a daughter, Rosemary (Lois Moran), who Joe left at a convent in Mandalay, under the care of his brother, Fr. James (Henry Walthall). Joe, a repulsive sight, occasionally emerges from his sordid, underworld activities to visit Rosemary, who works in a bazaar. Joe plans to clean up his act within two years, once he has enough money to undergo plastic surgery and retire. Joe wants to be a reborn man, so he can reunite with his daughter and rescue her from the confines of poverty. Rosemary, however, unaware that Joe is her father (a frequent Browning theme), is repulsed by dead eyed Joe, understandably mistaking his friendliness for sexual predation. Fr. James warns Joe that waiting two years is too long. Joe’s insistence for patience only makes Fr. James skeptical that Joe can actually achieve or sustain the redemption necessary to give Rosemary a good life.
PLOT: A young hotshot ad exec begins to crack from stress when he has difficulty coming up with a campaign for pimple cream; compounding his problems, he grows a boil on his neck that gradually develops a face, and a nasty personality.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The talking boil, the cracked Bagley tossing thawed chickens into the toilet wearing only an apron, and a few other weird surprises. What works against Advertising‘s weirdness is that the film’s bizarro bits are all part of a perfectly clear and rational satirical plan.
COMMENTS: Ad exec Dennis Bagley develops the mother of all zits in this blackheaded black comedy: does he need a dermatologist, or a psychologist? He’s up against a deadline to design an ad campaign for a pimple cream account, and he’s obstructed. “I can’t get a handle on boils,” he explains. “Compared to this, piles were a birthday present… so was dandruff!” Brilliantly portrayed by an acerbic and unhinged Richard E. Grant, Bagley is a man on the edge from the moment we meet him. He delivers an authoritative, amoral address to junior execs delighting in the dieting-reward-guilt dynamic that keeps women buying unwholesome food and stressing the importance of marketing to “she who fills her basket;” but in private, his advertiser’s block is driving him to knock back highballs in his office and nearly break down into quivering mass at lunch with his beautiful wife Julia (Ward). On a fateful train ride home for a weekend of fretting over the acne campaign, frazzled Bagley has an epiphany about the pervasiveness of the advertising/propaganda mentality while listening to strangers discuss a sensational newspaper account of a drug orgy, and launches into the first of many entertainingly deranged rants. By the next morning Bagley has gone completely off his rocker: he’s running around the house nude except for an apron, thawing frozen chickens in the bathtub and trying to rid the homestead of everything connected to advertising. But, to his distress, he’s also developed a rather nasty and surprisingly painful pimple on his neck, one Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING (1989)→
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
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Unfortunately, The Road to Mandalay exists only in fragmented and disintegrated state, a mere 36 minutes of its original seven reels. In this passionately pretentious film, which is not related to the Kipling poem, Chaney plays “dead-eyed” Singapore Joe (Chaney achieved the eye effect with egg white) who runs a Singapore brothel. Joe’s business associates are the black spiders of the Seven Seas: the Admiral Herrington (Owen Moore) and English Charlie Wing (Kamiyama Sojin), the best knife-thrower in the Orient. Joe’s relationship with his partners is tense and, often, threatening.
